udev Woes

In addition to school, frisbee golf and dealing with burglers, I've been helping with the latest release of Dropline GNOME for Slackware Linux. I'm responsible for building, testing and troubleshooting packages related to integrating digital camera support into GNOME. Usually my meager knowledge of the underpinnings of a Linux system is enough for me get it all working but this release cycle is different. Finally, after over a year of development Slackware 11 was released on last Monday. With it came some rather large changes to the system boot process and how hardware is managed with newer kernels. Specifically, if you decide to use a 2.6 kernel, linux-hotplug is disabled and device support must be handled entirely by udev. The problem is that with older versions of Slackware, linux-hotplug handled the creation and permissions of device nodes but since linux-hotplug will most likely be disabled (most of our users will be using a 2.6 kernel) I need to figure a way to get udev to create the proper nodes and more importantly, set the permissions on those nodes so that the appropriate users can access their camera. This involves deep understanding of the how Linux manages devices and how to write udev rules. In short, this problem is way over my head, especially while I'm in school and don't have an internet connection. There's some pretty smart guys on our development team, so I'm hoping they can figure it out. Hopefully it won't be too long before we get this and a few other bugs worked out and can release our final product. I"ll keep you posted...